Syrian forces killed as many as 138 people on Monday as artillery
pounded rebel-held areas of Homs, continuing an assault that started 3
weeks ago, Al Arabiya reported, citing activists.

The outside world has proved powerless to halt the killing in Syria,
where repression of initially peaceful protests has spawned an armed
insurrection by army deserters and others.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent did manage to enter the besieged Baba Amro
district of Homs and evacuate three people on Monday, the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said. Foreign reporters trapped in the
area were not evacuated and the bodies of two journalists killed there
had not been recovered, it said, according to Reuters.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government announced that voters had
overwhelmingly approved a new constitution in a referendum derided as a
sham by his critics at home and abroad.

While foreign powers argued over
whether to arm the rebels, the Syrian Interior Ministry on Monday said
the reformed constitution, which could keep Assad in power until 2028,
had received 89.4 percent approval from more than 8 million voters.

Syrian dissidents and Western leaders dismissed as a farce Sunday’s
vote, conducted in the midst of the country’s bloodiest turmoil in
decades, although Assad says the new constitution will lead to
multi-party elections within three months.

Voting turnout

Officials put national voter
turnout at close to 60 percent, but diplomats who toured polling
stations in Damascus saw only a handful of voters at each location.

Assad says he is fighting foreign-backed “armed terrorist groups” and
his main allies -- Russia, China and Iran -- fiercely oppose any outside
intervention intended to add him to the list of Arab autocrats unseated
by popular revolts in the past year.

But Qatar joined Saudi Arabia in advocating arming the Syrian rebels,
given that Russia and China have twice used their vetoes to block any
action by the U.N. Security Council.

“I think we should do whatever is necessary to help them, including
giving them weapons to defend themselves,” Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh
Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said in Oslo.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe criticized the U.N. Security
Council’s “impotence” on Syria, shown by the Russian and Chinese vetoes,
and accused the Syrian authorities of “massacres” and “odious crimes.”

In a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Juppe said the
time was ripe for referring Syria to the International Criminal Court
and warned Assad he would be brought to justice.

“The day will come when the Syrian civilian and military authorities,
first among them President Assad himself, must respond before justice
for their acts. In the face of such crimes, there can be no impunity,”
Juppe told the 47-member Geneva forum, which will hold an emergency
debate on Syria on Tuesday.

Shells and rockets crashed into districts of Homs that have already
endured weeks of bombardment as Assad’s forces try to stamp out an
almost year-long revolt against his 11-year rule.

Failure to evacuate foreign journalists

Our team, composed of some 20 volunteers, extremely
courageous with four ambulances and a hearse, entered Baba Amro and
remained there for nearly three hours while representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross waited outside

Abdul Rahman Attar, Arab-Syrian Red Crescent

The ICRC has been pursuing talks with the
Syrian authorities and opposition forces for days to secure access to
besieged neighborhoods such as Baba Amro, where local activists say
hundreds of wounded need treatment and thousands of civilians are short
of water, food and medical supplies.

ICRC spokesman Hisham Hassan said a team from the Syrian Arab Red
Crescent team had entered Baba Amro. “They have been able to evacuate
three persons, including an aged woman, and a pregnant woman and her
husband,” he said.

The trio were believed to be Syrian and did not include four Western
journalists trapped in Baba Amro, two of them wounded. A U.S. reporter
and a French photographer were killed there on Feb. 22.

The head of the Arab-Syrian Red Crescent, Abdul Rahman Attar, also
confirmed Monday that the negotiations and preparations under way Monday
failed to lead to the evacuation of the journalists.

“Our team, composed of some 20 volunteers, extremely courageous with
four ambulances and a hearse, entered Baba Amro and remained there for
nearly three hours while representatives of the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) waited outside,” he said, according to AFP.

He said his team was told by an intermediary in Baba Amro that French
reporter Edith Bouvier refused to leave if the conditions she insisted
on were not met.

“We do not know her conditions and we do not know if she really refused
because we were not able to have direct contact with her,” he added.

International pressure

I very much hope the United States and other
countries ... do not try to set a military scenario in motion in Syria
without sanction from the U.N. Security Council

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin

International consternation has grown over
the turmoil in Syria, but there is little appetite in the West for
military action akin to the U.N.-backed NATO campaign in Libya.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Western powers hoped diplomacy
could change minds: “We are putting pressure on the Russians first and
the Chinese afterwards so that they lift their veto.”

The European Union agreed more sanctions, targeting Syria’s central bank
and several cabinet ministers, curbing gold trading with state entities
and banning cargo flights from the country.

“I very much hope the United States and other countries ... do not try
to set a military scenario in motion in Syria without sanction from the
U.N. Security Council,” said Putin.

The new constitution drops a clause making Assad’s Baath party the
leader of state and society, allows political pluralism and limits a
president to two seven-year terms.

But this restriction is not retrospective, implying that Assad, 46 and
already in power since 2000, could serve two further terms after his
current one expires in 2014.

The opposition dismisses the reforms on offer, saying that Assad, and
his father who ruled for 30 years before him, have long paid only lip
service to existing legal obligations.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, now the new U.N.-Arab League
envoy on Syria, was holding separate talks in Geneva with Juppe and
Iran’s foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi on the sidelines of a U.N.
Human Rights Council meeting.

Iran is Assad’s closest ally. The main Shiite Muslim power, it has
religious ties to Assad’s Alawites and is confronting the Sunnis who
dominate the Arab League -- both the Sunni Islamists who have done well
out of the past year's democratic changes and autocratic, Western-backed
leaders in the Gulf and elsewhere.